For a variety of reasons I run a local version of dovecot on my computer, which let’s me access older mail files stored locally in my account.

Using the amazing Homebrew package manager I installed dovecot on my Mac and it has been working pretty flawlessly, until just recently when I did an upgrade.

The upgrade went from dovecot version 2.3.21 to 2.4.0, and there have been a ton of configuration changes between versions, more than just minor ones. In fact, the maintainers are adding a configuration version variable so that future upgrades can use old configurations but that starts with 2.4.0 and doesn’t help me with my current configuration.

After spending about an hour trying to get 2.4.0 to run, I decided to go back to the older version. I mean, I’m the only one who uses the server and I don’t need any new features. I just want the old system to work.

It turns out that it is pretty easy. First, I deleted version 2.4.0:

rm -r /usr/local/Cellar/dovecot/2.4.0

Then I relinked all the symlinks to point to the older version, 2.3.21, that was still installed:

brew link dovecot

After verifying that dovecot now worked, I used:

brew pin dovecot

to make sure that dovecot would not be upgraded in the future.